The first three episodes of The Bad Batch season three have arrived on Disney Plus and they offer one of the best openings to a Star Wars show I’ve ever seen.

They’re something of a shift from the first two seasons, which switched tone often and had a lot of standalone episodes as the Batch drifted around the galaxy, trying to find a safe place to settle, or else taking on one mission or another to make money. Here it all feels much more focused and more intense, with some good character development for Omega and Crosshair as they exist on the soulless routine of the Imperial lab.

it surprised me that the two of them managed to escape so soon in the series. I’d expected it might focus on the other members of the Batch trying to free them, so this definitely offers up a lot of new opportunities for where the story can go. I only hope they don’t go to a simple “Imperials are chasing Omega to kidnap her” storyline, which was really the basis of the first two seasons.

There are a lot of nice touches here and there, like the young clone cadets. Most of the clones we’ve seen in the show are veterans of the war who’ve been discarded by the Empire, and while it’s hard for them to adjust to their new lives, at least they have skills and experience that could make them useful as things like bounty hunters. The cadets here will have to spend their entire lives without any real purpose in a galaxy that no longer needs or wants them, and those live will be much shorter than normal humans. This all goes to reinforce just how disastrous and immoral the idea of cloning millions of soldiers was.

It’s clear why they decided to release all three episodes at once. We don’t see Wrecker and Hunter until episode two, and audiences would have been expecting them to show in the premiere. It also allows the story to pick up next week at the interesting junction it left us. Hunter is trying to find Omega, while Omega now has to find the others, and neither will have an easy task, promising interesting things in the future.

There were a few odd things in the episodes, like the fact Nala Se was destroying Omega’s blood samples without being found out by Hemlock. It’s also never been clear why Omega is so important to Project Necromancer, as she is only a clone of Jango Fett, unless there’s some secret about her creation that’s yet to be revealed.

All in all, though, these were a great start, bringing a darker edge to the series which will no doubt set the tone for the show as a whole. It feels like a step up from previous seasons in every way, and all I can say is that’s a good thing. Let’s hope it continues!

Thanks for reading!